This Week in Startups - Jason’s EOW (End of Week) | 4/16/20

Episode Date: April 17, 2021

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I thought I would try a new, just a new concept, basically a little live recording. And I thought I would recap the week for you. I wanted to try doing some live streams here on some live streams using my YouTube channel since there's a lot of people who follow the YouTube channel. I just thought of what I worked on this week and I'll share it with you. First off, it was a big week for the podcast. Obviously, this week in startups is just growing like investors. I just found this Canada dry.

I love ginger ale, die ginger ale. And I got this giant two-liter one. I think we had a party or something. And I was like, I kind of drink this before it goes bad. So you guys get to experience me drinking. What is my favorite beverage of the moment, which is Canada Dry? But I like the Canada Dry Zero Sugar. I think that one's better.

So what happened this week? What investments am I doing? This is great. It's so nice to see a bunch of you here. So the last five twist today, we have. have an episode with Ken Win from Republic. And that was a great episode. Obviously, Republic is growing like gangbusters. Republic, for those of you don't know, is equity crowdfunding, slightly different than what Angelist or I do on the syndicate.com, which is accredited investors.

What's an accredited investor? A credited investor is basically in the United States, a rich person, the top 5% of the country, people who make over $200,000 a year, and they're allowed to invest in venture capital firms and private companies. But civilians, non-accredited investors, what people would say is non-sophisticated. It's really kind of demeaning language. You could make $50,000 a year and be smarter than somebody who makes $500,000, obviously. But we have this rule that rich people don't need to be protected. Poor people need to be protected.

I get it. It's with good intent. But the result is, you know, people who are coming up in their careers like I was in my 20s can't invest in companies that they know are going to do great or they suspect will do great. You can go bet on sports, but you can't go bet on a company that you love. So Republic does equity crowdfunding. Equity crowdfunding, regulation CF, means you can put in $5 million a year. And they just had that change happen, I think, last month. And it was, used to be a cap of $1 million. A person named Sahil from Gum Road, who is a venture capitalist. He raised $5 million

from 9,000 investors in a day, and then Arlen from backstage capital, raised 5 million from 6,900 investors. So I also had those two on the podcast. So see what I'm doing when we produced a podcast. If there's a big breaking news story, I want to take it from multiple angles. That's part of what I want to do. And we go, you know, we go deep on this podcast. We go for an hour.

Most people are doing short podcasts. I get that. I like to let the interview breathe. And, you know, if you want to skip ahead or some part's boring. where you want to put it on two-time speed. That's fine with me. But the discussion I want to have for this week in startups is a long, deep discussion with the people who are making the decisions.

And I want you to really get to know them. Now, if you're a casual person who is into tech, you know, kind of 10% of the time, you don't want an hour or two-hour interview. But that's what I want to do. So I do this podcast This Week in Startups for me, primarily. I have to be interested in it. I have to want to go.

to episode 2000, right? We're here at episode 1100 or something. And so I do the show primarily because of my own interest in curiosity. The fact that it's now got hundreds of thousands of listeners per episode, maybe 10 million a year, that's awesome. I'm excited about that. And I do think about you, the audience, when I ask questions, I'm always thinking, okay, what does the audience want to know? So I do take that into account. But to be clear, I want to go deep and I want to do the deep interview before it hits the mainstream, right? And that's why if you listen to this week and startups, you get it early, as it were. So Sahil was on episode 1188. And Arlen, I recorded yesterday, and that's going to come out next Friday. We're doing about four episodes a week of

this week in startups. And then on Fridays, I don't rest. I do the All In podcast, which we tape today. So episode 1199 today is Ken from Republic. Episode 1188 was Sahil from Gumroad to Race 5 and then Arlen. So if you watch those three and you're interested in raising money for your startup, what a great three-part series there on these important topics. Then we did episode 1198 this week. We brought back a series called Scaling Your Startup. The two things founders always want to know for me.

Will you give me your money? How do I get money? Great. And then two, how do I scale my startup? How do I make my startup bigger? How do I make more money? And so we do this series scaling your startup. And it's just laser-like focused on tactical stuff, really tactical or techniques,

is what we call that area of expertise, that zone of excellence, how to grow, com.com or FitBod or Steasy, how to get more people into your SaaS product, how to get more people to buy your hardware product. And there are a lot of techniques. In fact, there's a whole career that you could have in technology. around growth. It used to be called marketing. Now it's called growth because marketing kind of means like advertising and it feels kind of soft and creative. Growth is really technical now. And there is a whole technical aspect to it like attribution. Where did these users come from? And then the tech, customer acquisition, pay to get them to your site. Did you earn them organically? You get the idea.

And so scaling your startup, season two, episode of this week in startups 1198, is up. And that was growth with Craig Zingerline. Craig Zingerline is a founder I've invested in, and he worked at another company. I invested in Red Tricycle. And he has a new product that we partnered with them on called Growth University. So he comes on and talks about growth with Alan Chen. Alan Chen is from FitBod, which is a company that's doing over $10 million in the cross-fitness health space. It's an app you can buy for, I think, five or ten bucks a month. Really amazing app. And it's going to be one of the big successful companies in our portfolio. So, that is a great one if you want to learn.

And it dropped on just this past Wednesday. You can watch this on YouTube. You can watch it. And it's good to watch it on YouTube. I'll be honest, because there's a deck associated with it. And I think we share the deck with you. And I think we have a URL for that. This week in Startups.com slash scale.

Somebody can check that for me if that actually works. Oh, I forgot. There's a chat room here of 99 people. Fantastic. And so definitely go check out that episode. they go over product roadmaps, customer acquisitions, something called activation and retention and retention. Do you keep people?

Activation is getting people to use your product. Let me take a look at the comments here. Yes, Alex, you're going to love the Ken episode. And great. Yeah, this week in startups.com slash scale to get all that stuff. Thanks, Wolf Capital. You're the man. No, you're the man.

And, yeah, I'll talk about Doge in a minute. Doge coin. We had episode 1197, which was Dapper Lab CEO, Roham, Gary Gosloo, Gary Gosloo, so he pronounced his last name. Dapper does the NBA Topshop, you know, all these NFTs, non-fundgible tokens, crypto kitties, etc. And so I tape that as part inside.com's NFT event. Inside.com is a company I run that's newsletters, events, and a Slack community. And you can go to inside.com and check it out. It took me a long time to buy inside.com.

I got it for like $65,000. It's probably a $5 million domain name. Really, I was so lucky to get that domain name. It took me 10 years. And he was really interesting. And obviously, NFTs are capturing people's imagination, hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, just for the NBA alone.

And we talked a little bit about, oh, does he have Disney? Oh, is he going to get Michael Jordan and all the rights clearing and the future of NFTs, which I think it's like the one thing in cryptocurrency I actually really believe in. It's the thing I have the most conviction about is these non-fungible tokens. And we're going to have

Medicovin. His interview is going to drop on Tuesday. And on Tuesday, when that drops, he's the individual who spent almost $70 million buying the NFT for Beeple. And that was really interesting. June, I'm having an event at InSycle Meet Our Fund.

So meet our fund.com is a, meet our fund.com is a new concept for an event. Here in Silicon Valley, we have a tradition of something called a demo day. A demo day is when a group of startups graduate from TechStars, Y Combinator, a launch accelerator, and 500 investors come in person or 10,000 online, whatever it is. They pitch their companies for two minutes each, and it's kind of a cattle call. And do you wind up seeing, if you can raise money for your startup. I decided to turn the tables. What if founders got to meet

the top 50 venture firms? So we're giving each venture firm 20 minutes to pitch, 10 minutes for Q&As. And we're asking those venture firms, hey, tell the founder how you invest, what you invest in, how much you invest, do you join the board, what value add do you have for their startup? What have you invested in? What are you planning to invest in? Just basically how do you do your work? And this is the first time anybody's ever come up with this idea, which is kind of weird. think this idea would have been done before. But I felt it was important to do because founders are always asking me over and over again for reference checks or does this fund invest in seed stage or do they only do late stage or do they like health tech or do they just like

SaaS, you know, people just don't know what a venture fund does. So I thought I would try and experiment and it's going very well. I'll be honest. We have nine amazing, amazing venture firms coming. If you follow me on Twitter.com slash Jason, and if you follow me, I've pinned it. We have our ninth company is, or ninth firm, we have nine of the 50 selected in just the first week. Dave Samuel from Freestyle, Pejman and Mar from PerivC, Katie Stanton, Sahill, who we mentioned before from Gumroad, who also has a rolling fund, Jay Katz, Paul Judge, Pierre Jacques from Harlem, venture partners, Nicole Quinn from Lightspeed, just a great, great group of folks are coming.

And so I'm very excited about that. And we're going to let 10,000 founders come for free, which is what I like to do. So I think we had 1,000 people sign up in the first week. So it's in two months. We'll easily get to 10,000, and we'll pick the funds as we go. If you have any ideas,

you know how to get me, Jason at Kalakhanis.com. So I'm excited about that. episode 1196 is Gickster co-founder Hank Lieber and that came out, I'm not sure when we released that episode. It might have been, it was this week, I believe. And so Gikster's an interesting story. They, and he tells the story on the podcast, but they knew me as an investor because of the podcast mainly and other things I do like free events.

That's basically how I build goodwill. with founders. I host these free events like Meet Our Fund. And then founders come to me five years later and say, hey, is that one of your free events? You gave me a free ticket. Thanks for that. Reciprocity, the reciprocation effect.

Then they think of me, oh, I'm raising money. Jason's an angel investor. I'm a little more than an angel investor right now, which is the point about Gigster. Gigster is an amazing company. G-I-G-G-G-G-S-T-E-R.com. And Gigster, what's amazing about this company is

they are kind of Airbnb for a location, scouting. So if you want it to have a party or a photo shoot or a movie or a YouTube video or a music video, you name it, a social media project, you can go on there and say, I'm looking for a warehouse, I'm looking for a dock, I'm looking for a Victorian home, I'm looking for an epic view of the Pacific Ocean, whatever it is. And it shows you all these places and locations you can rent for photo shoots, etc. So if you're a Hollywood scout who scouts locations, it's a database of locations. And, it just saves you so much time.

So they don't compete with the talent agents. A lot of the location scouts, a lot of the location scouts use Gigster, G-I-G-G-G-G-G-E-R. I've got to figure out in this live stream, Nick, producer, Nick, if I can mix in a video. So it would be really cool if there was a tool where I could put a video right here of Gigster, or while I was, where if we could collaborate on this, Nick, where I could have you pulling up the tool. So let's think about that. Maybe it's just as easy as doing a Zoom. but it would be cool for me to master YouTube studios the first time I'm using it.

Anyway, the reason I bring up this is because we put in, I think, 500K or 750K from our venture fund into Gixter. That's thousands of dollars. And then I shared it with my angel syndicate. So I have a syndicate, the syndicate.com, which has 7,500 accredited investors like I talked about before, rich people. and in that syndicate, I think we wound up raising a couple million bucks. So without giving away the amount that we invested, it was millions of dollars. In fact, it was the largest bet I've ever made on a startup, which I'm pretty excited about. And so we're raising a lot of money for startups, and it's working well.

And then episode 1195, I had Snack CEO Kim Kaplan on. It's basically TikTok meets Tinder, and she was, I think, the COO, chief operating officer. She ran the show at Plenty of Fish if you're a dater and you use POF, which got bought, I think, by the match group at IAC, or maybe that's a separate group. That was my week in terms of episodes, both ones I've taped and ones that came out. And we have about six or seven people working on the podcast here. You guys are probably not privy to that. You wonder how we produce all this content. We've got Charles doing video editing, Nick producing, Justin producing,

a sales executive mat and then two marketers and other contributors. So we got a lot of people working on this. I have a little gray hair on the side. Yeah, I've been wondering, you think I should color that? I don't know how to – I've never colored my hair, so I don't know how to do that. But yes, I do have a couple of gray hairs here. So I'll answer some questions here. You can use Zoom to live stream.

Thank you. So up Jason. Hey, Hernandez. You're the best. Thanks for that. Wow, Jason, so cool. great podcast. Thanks for that. Trinity C. You are Elon's

best friend. I don't know about best friend. One of his best friends, I would think. I consider him one of my best friends. You can ask him if you think's that. But yeah, I think we're besties. Yeah. And

hey Jason, any advice on choosing which deals to invest in for the launch syndicate finding it hard to pull the trigger? Andy, great question. If you're a credited investor, you have to learn the skill of angel investing. So come to Angel University, angel. University, which is the course I teach. And then the other thing you want to do is, in addition to Angel University, read my book, Angel.

And in the book, I say, pick a small amount of money to Angel invest. Let's say your net worth was, I'm going to pick a number here, $3 million. So you're affluent, but you're not $300 million, $30 million? Yeah, $3 million. It's a nice chunk of change. Don't get me wrong. And maybe part of that's your house, part of it, your retirement, whatever. you make $250,000 a year, you're doing great.

If you were to take 10% of that and lose it, you would lose 300,000. Well, you make 250 a year and you probably make 5, 10% on your money and your other investments or the appreciation of your home. So you could probably withstand losing it. That's kind of what I advise people. So somewhere between 1% and 10% of your net worth that you don't need to access for a decade because that's how long investments take, and then just place the smallest bets possible, 2K, 5K each time.

And let's say you get to 20 investments, you put 100,000 in. Out of those 20, maybe 3 or 4 will break out, and you can always put another 10K or 20K into each of those. And that bet shaping where you double, triple, or essentially, I'm saying in this example, 5x or 10x on the winners, then you will have in your portfolio construction a really interesting portfolio and a chance of hitting an outlier. And that's really what you're doing in angel investing. If you're making 20 bets, you just need to hit one that pays off greater than 20 to one for you to hit break even. And that's what we do all day in Silicon Valley. It's high risk,

it's high reward and it's super exciting. And the other piece of advice, always, always, always, when you're starting out, have that diversification is my best advice. That's what I tell my mom or my cousin if he was or she was investing. And the other thing I would do is, is, you know, is really think about investing in companies that have products in market already. And customers you can talk to. Most startups die before they ever get their first customers. So if you wait and you only invest when you have your customers, you're in good shape. Wow, we have been with you since you started.

Thank you. Jake, Hal, any advice of breaking into venture capital? The psychology degree, I do. I have a psychology degree. Go to how to get a job in VC.com. I literally just wrote this because I get this question a lot. So I talk about, if you go to how to get a job in VC, you'll see at me talking about this. And hold on a second.

I'm just going to go to another room. Okay, here we go. Boom. So I explained on that web page. I just made it because some people ask me the question. I like to get a domain name and just send people there. You either have to go to a business school like Harvard or Stanford and spend a quarter million or you can work at a successful company, get into growth,

or you can be an angel investor. There's a couple different routes. So I'm going to build out that page with more information. If a startup has 17, this is Goulame, or debt, if a startup has 17,000 weekly active users, but really needs 50,000 to support more devices and get to the next month. So would you recommend doing a crowdfunding from the users? Yeah, I think that's what Republic does particularly well.

If you crowd fund from your users, now they have more skin in the game. not only do they use it, but they have ownership in it. So imagine if YouTube had let the first, you know, 10,000 creators buy shares in YouTube. They would have all been rich. Imagine if Casey Neastat or, you know, Mr. Beast or whatever his name is Beesberg or like these guys, if those cats owned, you know, 10,000 shares of the company that they spent $10,000 on and it became worth $10 million, they'd be pretty loyal to this platform and that would be great for them. So other things I did this week, since a lot of you want to know what I do in a week,

a lot of my week is managing and hiring people. That's what you do as a CEO and a founder, and then talking to companies. So I did a podcast. I did a podcast called Refounder with my friend David Kidder. That's not out yet. But I did the refounder podcast for a friend of mine. I had the interview with Ken on Monday. I did the scaling your startup on Monday.

I had a phone call with Young Spielberg, who does the soundtrack, Wet Your Beak. I'm going all in. Great, great soundtrack. I got a massage Monday night. I got a couple's massage. That was kind of fun because I strained my back going skiing last week on ski week and carrying my 14-year-old bulldog up and downstairs.

Brutal. So hard. My back's been hurting. I did an interview with somebody who wants to come to the accelerator on Tuesday. And I did. I did a podcast for something called In Their 20s. It's a podcast for people in their 20s. So I get about, I don't know, a couple dozen podcast requests a week, probably 100 a month.

And I basically say no to everything because I have to do this podcast. But I will say yes to like a young person doing a new podcast once in a while just to kind of like pay it forward. Because I know how hard it is to get a guest when you're just starting out and you're a nobody. Nobody knows your podcast. You have no listeners. So I'll just say yes. I'm like, fuck it. I'll support some kid who's got a new podcast because I know it will have a positive impact on their life.

And I wish, you know, I had some people who did that for me when I was coming up. I had my inside team meeting on Tuesday. I always like to do that on Tuesday. I met with an Australian startup that I really liked that I'm going to invest in, I think. My wife got me a personal trainer. So Tuesday, I did couples personal training. so it was a good week for the marriage. We did a couple's massage on Monday night,

and at 5.30, we trained with Tony at the house, which was quite nice. On Wednesday, I had my launch accelerator. And so I actually go to the accelerator class twice a week. This was our 22nd class, and we have them pitch for three minutes. I'll just listen. I'll take notes, and I try to give them notes on their presentation

from the point of view of an investor. And this is kind of the secret of our accelerator, is we introduce our founders to a thousand investors over 16 weeks. And then I personally tell them, here's why I think they're asking you that question. So my job is almost like a coach. And then I have other coaches on my team like Jackie and Pras and Ashley and other folks. And what they do is they'll actually write the questions people get and organize the questions.

So we kind of analyze what questions does this startup keep getting from investors? And then we ask why. Well, sometimes investors will just ask a generic question like, why now? That's just a classic question. Why is this startup idea going to work now? What we do is if people keep asking you about your business model and how you make money, well, it's probably because it wasn't clear in your presentation. And if it's not clear in your presentation,

it's probably because you as a founder have not been clear about what your business model is. So then we know what to drill down on. And that is a very helpful thing to do. I had my staff meeting with my launch team. So I run two companies launch, which is the investment company inside, which is the business. information company. And so Tuesdays, I meet with the Inside Team.

Wednesdays, I meet with the launch team. I had a board call with Ciener. Ciener is a very cool company that went through our accelerator. And it's kind of like a watch party. I don't know if you guys have HBO Max, but they have a partnership, Ciener, and you can watch a movie with your friends. And so they have permission from all these online streamers.

So if you want to do a watch party, you just do it on C-E-N-E-R. So you know you want to watch the new Falcon tonight or the new Mandalorian. Or in the case of HBO Max when the Zach Snyder Justice League cut came out, which was amazing compared to the piece of junk that was the previous, they did a watch party with Zach Snyder. and you could actually hear him talking about his film while they watched it. I'm really excited about Seiner. I think it's the future of really consumption of all these streaming services.

And they don't compete with those streaming services. They just help you do a watch party. So she'd totally check it out. I don't know if anybody here has you done it. There was another company called Netflix Party. And I guess they had used Netflix without the permission of Netflix. And that was like a Chrome extension. Ciener is a little bit of a more well-put-together product with the permission of the studios.

Not that I'm trying to deride the other company, but my company is much better. Also, on Wednesday, I had the launch accelerator. I brought them to see David Sachs. Not in person. We did it virtually, but I would normally do that in person. So David and I are besties. David's been an LPMI fund. We share deal flow.

So I always like to bring the latest company to David to get his. to get his feedback on those companies, and it's great for the founders to pitch somebody as baller as him. And then I did Q&A. I do office hours with my startup, so I did office hours that day as well. On Thursday, I did launch Accelerator 21. And then I taped the Arlen Hamilton,

and then last night I had a board of directors meeting for lead IQ at 630 because somebody who invested in the company is in Singapore or Malaysia or something. And we have to do these weird nighttime board calls, which I'm not crazy about, to be totally honest. Today was a big day for me. I did CNBC at 8 a.m. I had Brad Gersner on This Week in Startups at 10.

I had the All In Podcasts for two hours, and now I'm doing this. So I've talked about four hours today. So kind of a crazy day for me. I'll be totally honest. I'm glad the weekends here because I'm exhausted. Make sure you sign up for this week in startups if you haven't on iTunes. That's great. Move us up the rankings.

And I really appreciate y'all tuning in. And I'll answer a couple questions here. And DC, what do you think of the current early stage SaaS valuations? They're crazy. They're outrageous. Yes. It's a little bit weird out there. Early stage valuations are very high. And I'm spending my time with my existing portfolio companies helping them raise funds a little bit more. And then doing, I'm doing about the same amount of early stage investing, but I am passing on some deals based on valuation. Because if it's going to cost me $30 million to invest in the startup and I can have, I don't know, let's say 14 people. people come to our accelerator and then make two direct invests for the same essential evaluation.

Maybe that makes more sense. And so you do have to be discerning. But that doesn't mean you don't, I wouldn't mind overpaying for a company that's doing great with amazing traction, but it is a little frothy out there for investors. So I agree on that. How do you work with the founding team in which you are the only motivated member, high energy Zuku? You quit and you go start your own company.

you are unlikely to make them motivated. And that is a bummer. I worked at a lot of companies where people at 4.59 were packing their things. And at 501, we're at the elevator bank. And I always looked at them and thought, hmm, what's that about? And they were all racing to get the train, you know, Grand Central to get back to Long Island to their miserable lives. And I was always like, aren't you good people motivated? But no, they're motivated to live their lives.

I get it. I'm motivated to building, so the people are motivated to, you know, live their best life or whatever. And they work to live. My work in my life is so intertwined. It's kind of like, I feel like I'm an artist. Like, I feel like picking up the guitar sometimes. I pick up the guitar and I can do that anytime I want. I feel like investing in a company, go invest.

Do you think they'll ever be a startup that can beat Instagram or Google at their own game, kind of like TikTok versus Instagram? That's a great question. Some of these companies are pretty sticky and they can be multi-decade franchises, but nothing lasts forever. And so we'll see if people can pivot. But even AOL, IBM, a lot of companies did have challenges in their second or third decade. These new companies, they are a little bit crisper and they know that they can lose their position,

so they keep buying other companies. I think Facebook would be a company in decline. Actually, we'd be talking about Facebook that way if they hadn't bought Instagram and WhatsApp. What it takes to cold pitch in 2021 email, LinkedIn? I think you have to know when to contact investors. Investors don't want to hear about your idea. They don't want to read your business plan. They want to see traction.

They want to see your product. They want to talk to your customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have a product. You don't have traction. Most investors are probably not going to want to talk to you. So there's a challenge there. A lot of times new founders think, I have an idea. Why won't this person meet with you?

It's like because there's a hundred other people who have traction and products and marketing customers. They're going to meet with them first. And there's no time for you. there's no time for you if you just have ideas. We need people who execute. Richard asks, what's the lead time for committing to deals in the syndicate? I'd like to join, but require time to get approval for my employer, HDL.

It generally takes a couple of weeks for us to wrap up. So what we would do with you, if you talk to my team at the syndicate, is you could put in a bet. You'd say, I want to bet $3,000 on this company. I call it a bet for a reason. You can make a bet in companies I'm investing in, in our investing. club. So I call the syndicate.com and investment club is not a platform. It's my personal club. People are there to invest alongside me. It's my club. I get to decide who's in my club and who's not. I have kicked people out of the club who are jerks or who are disrespectful

to my staff. That's a big no-no. Or who are cantankerous or who are just difficult to deal with because startup investing is hard enough. If you're going to be difficult, we don't need you. So I literally have fired. I fire one person every two or three months. I mean, I don't want to do that. I do take pleasure in it. I'll be totally honest. I do love ghosting somebody from the syndicate if they've been rude to a founder. So then what we would do is if you had to back out, it wouldn't be the end of the world because most of the deals are way over subscribed.

So if somebody backs out, either I take the allocation or somebody else does. But it depends. You got to talk to your employer about going quickly. Or maybe you could say to them, if I invest under $10,000 doesn't matter. And maybe they'll say under $10,000, you know, use your own judgment. Connor asks for business-minded people in tech, How do you see people getting into growth positions? You can just learn it yourself.

Go to Growth University. Look at all the growth stuff going on online. You just growth is as growth does. If you just learn how to buy ads on Facebook and Twitter and Google, you know how to write copy, make landing pages. This stuff is not rocket science. And there's a bunch of different courses online and free videos. You don't need permission to learn this stuff.

Just go do it. What do you think of Elon is doing with all the doge? and what's the point? Well, I think it's a big joke. Doge is just a funny meme thing. And I bought $4,000, $4,500 worth of Doge today. And I started making fun of Doge all day long because I saw Doge went way up. My wife had bought some and was crowing about how much money was. So I was like, okay, I'll just pile on. And I bought some. And I've been joking about it on my Twitter handle all day saying that, you know, Doge curse cancer and Doge will make you 100 IQ points. And I've been posting that I've been up, I literally have been up 500 and down 500, I think, in the same hour on Doge coin. So it's been fluctuating 10% up and down, which is like a 20% swing. And it's worth nothing. It has, there's nothing behind this. So as a piece of performance art, I'm basically doing what El Presidente does and just buying Doge and making funny commentary about it. It's a, I find it personally hilarious. But to be sure, giant is,

disclaimer, don't make important life decisions based on memes and imaginary money. And I think cryptocurrency is largely a giant Ponzi scheme and a religion. There is real technology behind it, but there's a lot of scamming going on. And be careful. If you have 90% of your net worth and crypto, please, for the love of God, go get some diversification, buy some Disney stock or Google stock or Amazon stock, maybe buy an apartment or a car. It's something you're going to get enjoyment from or something that could be a lasting asset, but be diversified for sure. How do you invest?

How do investors feel about space companies? I mean, space is really hard, as you can see. And there's been one or two hits in it, but most people who invest in car companies or space companies lose all their money. There's only really one space company and one car company that's worked out. both happen to be run by the same person. So, you know, if run by Elon Musk, sure, buy the stock, buy the company. But I don't know if other companies are worth buying.

I mean, certainly not Fisker. That is garbage. Or I personally think it's garbage. Please don't sue me for having an opinion. I know how to phrase things now so I don't get sued. I think Fisker is a disgusting product. I think they're incompetent and I believe they will fail again. I am not saying it's a fraud.

I'm not saying it's a scam. But I am saying if you placed a bet on it, you should do your research and look at how many times that company failed and how bad their products were historically before you make a bet on them. And I just think if people have tried three or four times to make something work or two or three times, whatever it is with them, why bother? Go buy Amazon. Go buy something that's a lock.

I think Fisker is the opposite of a lock. I think that's a quick way to burn your money. That's just one person's opinion. I'm having trouble converting Instagram likes to sales. I have clothing that I launched at the beginning of the year. Have barely any sales. Yeah, so I think, I'll just broaden the discussion of your question, Trey. Direct-to-consumer products are really hard.

I only invest in direct-to-consumer products if the product is highly differentiated and the founder understands growth. You, to your own question here, don't know. how to do growth. So you have to learn growth. And that's why I wouldn't invest in you at this time. If you learned growth and you could make the product sell, that's great. And you also have to have a product that's super differentiated. An example of that might be eight sleep. We invested in this company. Eight sleep is obsessed with growth and they have a product that is highly differentiated. It's not like the other mattresses out there. In today's day and age, you have to have something that is

really differentiated. So another example of that is nude bar. This is a product that doesn't exist in other places in the world and a founder who's incredibly growth-minded. And so we're looking for, if we do invest in a company that is building a physical product and selling it direct, we want something really differentiated, incredibly well-constructed so that it captures people's imagination and that you have super growth. How do you define product market fit? Most people would define product market fit as there's a group of customers, the market, that love your product so much that they won't shut up about it.

That's it. They can't stop using it. They won't shut up about it. In other words, you made a product that resonated, that connected with people. Market is a fancy word for people. Product is a simple word for product. So the market is what gets people a little confused in that. It should really just be people product fit, consumer product fit.

But hopefully you have many consumers. But before you worry about many consumers, have your product connect with a consumer. And then a dozen consumers and then 1,200 consumers, right? You get the idea. All right, this has been fun for me to do. I've been live for 38 minutes. How do you become growth-minded? By the way, are we set up for me to take like super chats

and people can send me money when I talk like this? There's some sort of feature. I know when I watch Knicks fan TV after the Knicks games, people give stars or super chats. Do I have to turn that on? Does anybody know how YouTube works? I've never done this, but I would like, to have you be able to send a dollar or two dollars to me through chat. Does anybody know how that

works? Not that I want the dollar or two. It's called applaud. Yeah, you can set up donations. I don't know how to do that. Somebody on my team look into that, okay? Super chat. That's what it's called. Thank you. I don't want your money. But I want to have super chat on because I might experiment with doing, I had this idea of maybe doing like a live telethon kind of thing, collecting money and then giving it to some cause. I like that idea. Super chat. There you go. Donate to my launch fund. The fund is closed and I can't talk about funds publicly. The next fund I do, if I do another fund, I might do the 506C, which is a public raise so then I could talk on the podcast.

I'm raising my fourth fund. Here's what I'm investing in. And I think that would work. How do you become growth-minded? Any resources? Oh, my Lord. God, there's so many. growth university.io is the company that we co-founded. I think they charge like 150 bucks a month or something like that. They do courses. The courses are not cheap but not expensive is the way I would put it. If you're in a company, it's cheap.

Yeah, $149 a month. Only do that if you work at a company. If you don't work at a company, just go to YouTube and start typing in growth stuff or go on Quora and look for growth hacks or go on Reddit and look for growth hacks or go on hacker news. All of those places have tons of free resources. If you want to be part of a membership community for $150 a month, $1,800 a year, go to Growth University at I.O. But only do that if your company's going to pay for it. I don't want you to come out of pocket for that. How do you see the U.S. versus China? That is a 45-minute discussion. You want my address?

No, please don't send me anything. Don't ever send me anything. I don't want to have you send me something and then you're going to call me and say, hey, did you get the bottle of wine I sent you? It's all very charming and very nice, but please don't do it. I don't want you to spend your money on that. I want you to spend your money on yourself and your family and making things good. I do this all as a service to you. The only way I make money is by investing in companies and I guess the podcast has advertisers on it.

Never want the audience to pay. But yeah, thanks for coming here to my EOW. EOW, by the way, is the end of the week. I ask all of my team members at the end of the week to spend 15 minutes at the end of the day. Some of them don't do it at the end of the day. They wait until the nighttime or some of them even have to leave work early and they get to it over the weekend. But I really like to get it by Friday, 5 o'clock. And what I like people to do is because I also want people to end and take their weekend.

So I beg my team at 5 p.m. right up your EOW. EOW is a bunch of bullet points of what you accomplish for the company that moved the ball forward. And it's a way for me to manage people without managing them. I think people should manage themselves, freedom and responsibility, yada, yada. And by doing an EOD and an EOW, end of day, end of week, and we do an SOD, I wake up in the morning, I look at my Slack room. I see 20 employees at inside, 15 team members at launch, and they all put in what they're working on today. And I can know what's going on. I know the pulse of my company.

And everybody knows what everybody else is working on. No dead weight in either of my companies. everybody is on point getting shit done. And if they don't get stuff done, you look at the SOD, you look at the EOD. I wrote a piece about this. EOD, EOW, Calacanus.com so I can find it. Lean managed.

I call it Lean Management, the power of the EOD. I'll post it into the chat here. There it is. So what would I do with a million right now? You know, I wake up every morning. I ask myself, all that. If you have a million, I would start a company.

Yeah, build a company. Find something you love to do. You know, spend a quarter million of it building a company over a year. And then fail and do it again. And then fail and do it two more times. And let's see if you can turn that 250 building a product or service and people love and raise money. And yeah, just crush it. SOD, as Charles is pointing out, is also a great to-do list.

So when you do your SOD, it kind of gets you focused on your day. When I first introduced this, I had, like a couple of people who were like, you're micromanaging and I don't like this. And I was like, okay, well, you're no longer at the company. I just knew at that point when you were complaining about the lightest management touch, that you were not meant to work for me. You are not going to achieve excellence in your career. If you can't write a five-minute start of day and a five-minute end of day,

you're weak, you're worthless. You should literally go work for the post office. You have no ambition. If you can't say, here's what I want to get done today. Because I'm being paid, because I want to have a career, because I want to serve the mission of the company and try to support founders and inspire innovation. My Lord, when people complain about the lightest management technique of freedom and responsibility, it means you're a baby. You're not an adult. You don't want responsibility.

You should go back to your mommy and daddy and you should let them tell you you're awesome and give you a ribbon for participating, but you should not. work in the real world with the big boys and girls who are trying to change the world and get rich and powerful and do meaningful work. You're just too lame. Honestly, and I'm not speaking to any individual person if you're trying to backtrack this to the whatever number of people who no longer work for me. You know, you really, when I say you're weak, you're worthless, that's kind of a quote from a movie. I think it was Animal House. I can't remember. But you really want to be able to go to bed at night knowing you put a hard day's work in and you contribute it to your team and you were there for them, right?

Do it right, folks. All right, 45 minutes. Here we go. The vent diagram between people who hate SODs and the people who do nothing at work is a circle. It is so true. What I found when I went remote was I figured out exactly who was crushing it at my companies. and luckily, you know, I'm a pretty good manager, but not perfect. You know, I'm not claiming to be a perfect manager, not by a long shot.

But if you want to be driven and do great stuff, I'm a good person to work for it. But man, the people who literally were not doing a lot of work got really nervous when we went remote. A lot of companies had this. When they went remote during the pandemic, they were like, oh, we haven't heard from this person. this person is not here in the office, they're not doing anything. And the boss has to actually look at your work. They have to look in the Slack room. They have to ask you what you did today.

And when you do that reporting, my God, you figure out who does what. And then what's great about this main management report, the EOD and the SOD and the EOW, when somebody leaves, you take their last four end of weeks and you consolidate them down into categories. And you say, okay, here's what they did this week. Great. That's the job description of their replacement. Or you can look at it and say, you know what, they did this. I don't know, they were writing the show notes.

I think we should just outsource that. They were spending half their time doing show notes. The show notes, the pod notes that we do post, we could just pay somebody 100 bucks a show to do that. Great, that's more efficient. Or it's easier. We don't need to have the head count internally, whatever decision you make.

That is how we would decide when somebody left. Show me their EOD and we'd say, okay, until we replace the person, you take this piece, you take this piece, you take this piece. and boy, did that make management so easy. All right. Show the work, do the work. Love you guys. And all in podcasts will come out tonight,

probably between 8 p.m. and midnight on the Pacific coast. Some of the upcoming guests, Brad Gersner, who's taking grab public through the largest spec ever. I just interviewed him today is coming out next week. And tonight, yeah, do you think Silicon Valley will lose strength? Sure. I should think Silicon Valley is going to stay the same, but other places are going to get the spillover. So I think Silicon Valley keeps growing, you know, and power and money.

But the spillover, there's nowhere for people to stay here anymore because it's too expensive. So the spillover goes to Austin. Spillover goes to Sacramento. Spill over goes to Miami, L.A., Napa, wherever. Okay. And Arlen Hamilton's coming next week. So you're going to love that. All right.

All right, everybody. think that's good. Take it easy. Have a great weekend. And I really love doing the show for y'all. If you, if you listen to the show, if you happen to find this because you listen to my podcast, I love, love, love doing the podcast. And I love the feedback. People ask more of time, how can you help me? Or how can you help me or thank me? If you share the show with somebody and they get value out of it, that really makes my day. If you see me at an airport or in person, just say you love the show because honestly, it fills my bucket. I get this, like, battery recharge every time somebody tells me about an episode. episode they love, tweet at me, that really does make me feel great. I'll be totally honest. It's, you know, so, oh, you found me because of Casey. Yeah, Casey's great. I want to have on the show again. Casey and I vibe, you know, I don't know what it is, but I think it's because we both kind of, we were, both had to overcome a little bit, him more than me to get where we are, but, and also as performers, I think we both appreciate each other. Um, this bloke is gross. They always tell you, don't read the comments. It was so beautiful. And then Dangerfield

comes in and says, this bloke is gross. Come on, oh, it's Rodney Dangerfield. I take it all back. It's an insult comic. I take it all back. That's funny. I actually like reading the comments. Bring back the launch hackathon.

I love doing the launch hackathon. Oh, that was so much fun. The only problem with the launch hackathon is we'd do it before our big launch festival. It would burn the entire staff out and we'd have a thousand hackers there. And then we would feed them. And no matter how much food. we bought, they would complain that there wasn't enough free food and we have to go buy more food. And literally I'd spend $20,000 on food, $50,000 on food. It was brutal.

Oh, we met in Vancouver. Very cool. Yeah, I love Canada. Got a lot of people there. Do more events like the NFT event. We will. Events.com. Nice to see the word bloke. Events.com. We actually have two events up there, a transportation one and meet the fund. And we're going to do like a weekly one. Let's turn your mahalo. a website into a trash management site. That's pretty funny. How can you stand on the financing? I can't, I could, you guys can make me answer questions from the two hours. I've been talking for five today. I'm losing my voice as you can hear. Love you guys. Bye-bye.